intercultural coaching

If coaching is largely about shifting and expanding people’s perspectives in a way that they can translate into daily actions, then working with individual belief systems and assumptions is vital. Beyond these individual creeds, coaching has to explore the embedded collective paradigms, which feel to humans like the water that fish blissfully and obliviously swim in.
Integrating the cultural dimension into coaching is not only necessary to increase coaching’s validity and applicability in today’s intercultural environment. It is also an opportunity to learn from alternative cultural perspectives about crucial areas such as communication, thinking, time, power, identity, purpose, organization, or territory. Bridging coaching and interculturalism leads to a more creative and global form of coaching.
We consider coaching both as a profession and as an important function of leadership.

Coaching is the art of facilitating the unleashing of people’s potential to reach meaningful, important objectives.

EXECUTIVE COACHING

OBJECTIVES

Complex nature of human behaviour produces many communication problems. It is worth to explore how diverse cultural orientations influence the way we perceive and interact with an increasingly culturally diverse world. The overall purpose of our executive coaching is to understand causes of intercultural conflicts in different communication settings and how to manage them effectively. We can work together on three areas of development:

Specific objectives we can address are:

To learn how culture, your own and other peoples’, shapes the understanding of intercultural conflict analysis.

To explore cultural awareness of ‘self’, ‘other’ cultures and the challenges encountered in interaction between people of diverse culture.

To analyze cases of intercultural conflicts in diverse situations namely; interpersonal, small group, teams at the workplace and global contexts, and acquire knowledge and skills that increase intercultural conflict competence.

To gain a critical perspective on local and global issues by using service learning pedagogy to address problems ensuing from increasing cultural diversity at the own workplace.

CASE STUDY

If your culture considers time as a scarce resource, that belief might have lead you to learn to manage time quite efficiently …but also to be caught in a permanent juggling act, running from one task to the next. A coach, when stuck in this worldview that “time is money,” could paradoxically exacerbate the problem by helping her clients to succeed at cramming even more into an already bursting schedule. By learning to view time as abundant, an outlook other cultures cherish, coachees are able to slow down and see more clearly what is truly essential. Similarly, believing that you are in control will typically lead you to pro-actively make your dreams happen (self-fulfilling prophecies). Yet taken to an extreme, this belief may incite people to succeed at all cost, including cheating or breaking down. On the other hand, when you respect nature and allow it to be in charge, you have to listen to your body and allow time for recuperation. Considering these alternative belief systems, as they are represented in different cultures, helps coachees to broaden their perspective. By taking care of themselves and of others they may achieve more sustainable success.

COACHING FOR WOMEN

Young women starting a career now are likely to think their prospects for success in business have never looked so good. Under pressure from activists and some government ministers, and with growing evidence that diversity at the top helps the bottom line, companies have stepped up their efforts to hire, retain and promote women. At the same time however women are still far from breaking through the “glass ceiling” which keeps them out of the top jobs in the public sector, says almost every statistic. In our individual coaching for women we try to help women to develop their unique leadership potential to make a difference in the world. Our program emphasises the importance of intercultural competence and knowledge, as our clients learn how change happens in a variety of real world contexts.

How can I find more balance in my busy life, solve problems and manage conflicts?

How can I improve my communication, better understand and relate more deeply to other people?

How can I have a a good relationship with my voice and autonomy and be firmly rooted in my femininity without losing in a male-dominated business world?

How can I make sense of all the issues facing our world?

Why do I do the things that I do?

OBJECTIVES:

Empower women to see themselves as effective change agents/leaders

Deepen women’ understanding of the ethical/spiritual dimension of leadership

Challenge women who want to be effective leaders in an interconnected world to continue practice of their intercultural skills and life-long intercultural engagement

WORKSHOP FOR WOMEN

We provide also regular workshops for women where we bring together women of different generations and with different experiences in leading. We ask them about their story of leadership: What motivated them to enter into visibility, to stop imitating men and develop their own “thing”, what their experiments were, their style and why they are burning for the cause they bring forth by developing their leadership skills and what they were able to move so far.

RELATIONSHIP COACHING

Getting involved with someone from another culture is very exciting and rewarding. Your friend or your significant other may show you the colors of life you have never seen, make you hear the music you never thought existed, and open your mind in ways you never realized were possible. Yet there are times when both of you misunderstand each other’s customs and cultures, and there are times when you find it so difficult to communicate that you don’t even try. Coaching has been known to be the tool that helps relationships flourish and succeed, so feel free to get in touch.

MIXED MARRIAGES

Mixed marriages – marriages between people of different faiths, races, ethnicities and geographic regions – often face additional struggles and challenges than people from the same cultural background, conflicts often multiply… Experts point to three issues that frequently cause misunderstandings and fights:

COMMUNICATION STYLE: People are so oriented to psychological interpretation that when a wife feels her husband isn’t paying attention to her, she doesn’t realize it’s because he has a different way of listening or of being involved in the conversation,” she says. Depending on what culture people are from, they will differ in how loudly and quickly they speak, and how they argue, tease and listen.

PARENTING: couples are often shocked when they become parents and realize that they have very different perceptions of how kids should act. Specifically, discipline, expectation of appropriate gender behavior, types of toys and the teaching of manners are very much culturally derived.

FAMILY: disharmony can result from differing cultural attitudes toward the extended family.

STRATEGIES FOR MAINTAINING A LOVING INTERCULTURAL RELATIONSHIP

How can intercultural couples cope and maintain a loving relationship when faced with multiple roadblocks? Here are some strategies:

Learn all you can about your partner’s culture. Become familiar with his or her cultural and religion background with no obligation to change yourself or convert to the other’s style.

Negotiate and renegotiate dicey issues. Ideally, the time to discuss and make agreements about intercultural topics is before the wedding.

Communicate with in-laws. It is wrong to assume that older people are incapable of change or that they won’t talk about cultural issues.

Be tolerant. You need to allow for more than one right way of doing things.

As a parent, try to anticipate the knee-jerk reaction that you might have when your partner tries to promote his cultural ways or when your child adopts elements of your partner’s culture.

Be optimistic about your multicultural family – growing up in a bicultural family can offer children a rich background and lots of additional values.

“My friends here do not struggle as much as we do. But then again, they don’t have to synchronize two different sets of cultural and religious backgrounds. We often clash over specific issues, like food. It drives me crazy that she doesn’t even let me cook pork. I think our arguments have gotten worse since the birth of our daughter. We weren’t sure how to raise our kid. Whose traditions do we pass on?”

OUR APPROACH

Based on Cultural Intelligence approach we provide an Executive Coaching which integrates the cultural dimension and a global perspective. Using the CQ teaches strategies to improve cultural perception, we look at motivation (CQ Drive), cognition (CQ Knowledge), meta-cognition (CQ Strategy) and behavior (CQ Action) in order to distinguish behaviors driven by culture from those specific to an individual, suggesting that allowing knowledge and appreciation of the difference to guide responses results in better business practice.

Van Dyne, & Livermore describe four CQ capabilities: motivation (CQ Drive), cognition (CQ Knowledge), meta-cognition (CQ Strategy) and behavior (CQ Action). CQ Assessments report scores on all four capabilities as well as several sub-dimensions for each capability. The four capabilities stem from the intelligence-based approach to intercultural adjustment and performance.

CQ-KNOWLEDGE – CQ-Knowledge is a person’s knowledge about how cultures are similar and how cultures are different. It includes: Business – knowledge about economic and legal systems Interpersonal – knowledge about values, social interaction norms, and religious beliefs Socio-linguistics – knowledge about rules of languages and rules for expressing non-verbal behaviors

CQ-STRATEGY – CQ-Strategy is how a person makes sense of culturally diverse experiences. It occurs when people make judgments about their own thought processes and those of others. It includes: